Why Didn’t I Think of That?

The Duke University Hospital in Durham, North Carolina, is a 924-bed academic medical center that serves a wide range of patient populations.

By Tim Dotson, Steve Arrowood, and Mike Canale

The lack of regulatory direction for wasting controlled substances has been a source of significant confusion in pharmacy and has resulted in a variety of waste practices being undertaken. While the DEA requires controlled substances to be rendered unrecoverable, they do not specify the methods to meet this definition.  Historically, many facilities have taken the path of least resistance and wasted these products via the sewer.

By Deanne Halvorsen

By Dennis Killian, PharmD, PhD

Peninsula Regional Medical Center (PRMC) in Salisbury, Maryland is the region’s largest tertiary care facility with 358 acute care beds, 30 transitional care beds, and 28 newborn beds. Over the last several years we have faced a series of challenges in our satellite oncology pharmacy (Richard A. Henson Cancer Institute) related to the preparation of compounded sterile products (CSPs).

By Thomas W. Cooley, RPh, MBA

In the early 1990s, Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) placed a major focus on developing technology to improve medication and patient safety. In 1993 computerized physician order entry (CPOE) was implemented, decreasing serious medication errors by 55%.1 Despite this advancement, there were still challenges with our medication-use system, so we employed a multi-disciplinary team to critically evaluate our entire medication-use system.